Chatham Islands

The Pitt Island adventure was followed by two years on the Chatham Islands where there was a small community hospital with 2-3 beds, a GP and 3 other RNs. On-call was covered by the nurses who were all PRIME trained and back up was sought from the GP as needed.  This was more like the General Practice setting I had been accustomed to on the West Coast.

A daily, 3-hour clinic was run by the GP, with the usual childhood immunisations and dressings, etc done by the nurses. Back to the 8-5 job!! But then there were also home visits to elderly, palliative care patients in the community, PRIME call-outs to a range of accidents and on one occassion, to a large fishing trawler in the area that had an extremely seasick “deck hand” who needed urgent medical care, before being flown out to the mainland for life saving treatment for AKI (acute kidney injury) and he required a kidney transplant as a result of the sustained dehydration.

Once again, on the Chatham Islands, I was faced with treating family or people that I had known all my life. Confidentiality was of upmost importance and the community were generally very good at protecting peoples privacy. Not asking… even when they saw cousin A’s car obviously parked outside the hospital all day!

There were MANY life flights off the Island during my two years, for a range of reasons, including the acute abdomen, accidents, burns, head injury, cardiac and respiratory conditions and premature labour. Women were not allowed to birth on the Island due to the lack of expertise available. However, one very determined local Islander did, despite this, as she was adamant she wanted her child born on her land, her place, with her people. A healthy child was born without complications and Mum was happy. Two years of this work and it was time to move back out to the mainland